A satellite image of Hurricane Francine as it approached the Louisiana coastline on Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2024.
A satellite image of Hurricane Francine as it approached the Louisiana coastline on Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2024. Credit: NOAA/Wikimedia Commons

Thunder will rumble, winds will howl, storm sirens will wail, and emergency alerts will squawk. 

So many of the warning signs of severe weather are audible, making tornados and hurricanes a dangerous time for deaf people. 

When Hurricane Francine began as a tropical disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico last weekend, two women — Debbie Barefield of Savannah, Georgia, and Rebecca Gemil of Austin, Texas — went into action, posting video after video for the Deaf Hurricane Information Group on Facebook.

In the videos, they aggregated storm tracking from the National Hurricane Center, alerts from the National Weather Service, safety tips from authorities and weather stories from local Louisiana news sites, interpreting every major report into American Sign Language. 

The women have continued the work, sometimes posting dozens of times per day and late into the night, and plan to keep going until Francine, which made landfall Wednesday in South Louisiana as a category 1, no longer threatens the deaf and hearing impaired community. 

Barefield, a professional interpreter who teaches ASL, and Gemil, who works at an animal shelter, were among seven women across the southeastern states who founded the group in 2017 ahead of Hurricane Harvey, which struck southeastern Texas as a Category 4 storm, killing hundreds and inflicting over $125 billion in damage. 

In an interview Wednesday over Facebook Messenger, Barefield said the Deaf Hurricane Information Group was able to summon rescuers to save a deaf couple in Texas trapped in their mobile home by Harvey’s floodwaters. 

“Deaf people are the last to receive news,” Barefield said.

Closed captioning services can be very inaccurate and unreliable, and many deaf people don’t have the luxury of being able to just pick up a phone and call 911 when situations turn bad, she said. For emergency services, the deaf use a video relay service that interprets their emergency requests to a 911 dispatch center, which often causes a delay in response times. 

This article was originally published by Louisiana Illuminator and appears here under a Creative Commons license.

Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: [email protected]. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on Facebook and Twitter.

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Wes Muller traces his journalism roots back to 1997 when, at age 13, he built and launched a hyper-local news website for his New Orleans neighborhood. In the years since then, he has freelanced for the...